WORCESTER — Is the hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world created by globalized economies and exploding information technology infrastructure a present-day miracle of innovation, creativity, and efficiency, or has it created a ruthless landscape that makes the average worker more expendable than ever?

Whatever the answer is, it almost doesn't matter. Because according to the picture that New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman painted Tuesday night for a packed audience at Mechanics Hall, both scenarios are playing out right now, and it's important that we adjust to it before the global economy passes us by.

Mr. Friedman was in the city to deliver the inaugural address of the Becker College Presidential Speaker Series.

Around every corner, a job is being replaced or streamlined by a robot, a piece of software, or an artificially intelligent voice on the other end of the phone, Mr. Friedman said. He told the story of lawyers being made obsolete by sophisticated software providing legal advice and entire customer service calls being completed without human interaction. He said managers at the Jamba Juice restaurant retailer in Manhattan plug weather forecasts into the scheduling software so workers' schedules can be adjusted according to how nice out it is.

Climate-controlled wages, online legal advice — Mr. Friedman described it as "TurboTax for the legal profession" — and artificial intelligence are not something out of the old "Jetsons" TV cartoon; Mr. Friedman wryly noted that George Jetson drove his own car in that particular vision of the future, while these days Google is perfecting the driverless car. These things are happening now, Mr. Friedman said.

"That's not the future," he said.

The flattening of the world, to turn the phrase Mr. Friedman coined, has made it a great time to be a consumer. Access to a world of cheap goods is only as far as the Amazon home screen on a cellphone. It's an amazing time to be an innovator, Mr. Friedman said. It's hard to be a leader with so many voices competing for attention on Twitter and Facebook, and politically, this incredibly noisy environment is shifting America from its roots as a representative democracy to a more direct one. It has created situations that never would have happened in decades past, like when Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama's chief of staff, bolted the White House to become mayor of Chicago.

"Did Caesar's top aide ever quit his job to go be mayor of Carthage?" he asked.

The worker faces the toughest challenges, Mr. Friedman said. The one thing the boss wants to know before hiring anybody is what their "extra" is.

"Average is officially over," Mr. Friedman said.

The old way of doing things was going to college — or not — and going out and finding a job.

"Now you will have to invent a job," Mr. Friedman said.

Long gone are high-wage, middle-skill jobs. In this hyperconnected world, the sought-after jobs are high-wage, highly skilled jobs. That creates an educational challenge, Mr. Friedman said.

The top tier of jobs in the new economy are creative-thinking, problem-solving, non-routine jobs. Repetitive, routine jobs have been crushed, Mr. Friedman said. And wages of non-routine, local jobs — the "butcher, baker, candlestick maker" jobs, as Mr. Friedman described them — are largely dependent on the presence locally of those non-routine, creative jobs.

The challenge of matching graduates to good jobs in the new economy will be in bringing below-average students up to average, "because there is nothing down there that will sustain a decent middle-class living," Mr. Friedman said.

The world is catching up to American creativity and innovation and technological sophistication, Mr. Friedman said. In 10 years, he warned, there will no longer be a digital divide in the world. Everyone will be connected. Everyone will be able to go out and create and invent, he said. He said a college in Iowa reported that 9 percent of its applicants in 2011 came from China and had perfect math SAT scores. He said that in South Korea, parents are constantly pressuring education officials there to help their children gain an edge in what is now a global labor market. He wondered how many parents in America are driving principals crazy to raise standards.

New American graduates need to be innovation ready, because the boss doesn't care what you know anymore— all that can be Googled.

"It's what you can do with what you know," Mr. Friedman said.

He urged the audience to act like new immigrants, who he said come to this country with a "paranoid optimism" that all they have can be taken away at any moment. He urged them to always "be in beta" and be willing to reinvent and adjust themselves, and told them to be relentlessly entrepreneurial. He urged them to be artisans at their jobs.

"Do your job every day as if you carved your initials in it," Mr. Friedman said.